The top 7 online workspaces for team success

Taking your workplace online lets you offer the flexibility employees expect. But there’s a lot more to it than signing up for a bunch of digital tools. You need to be intentional about choosing ones that bring your teams and information together, so people can always find each other and get work done.

The right online workspace tool will help you do exactly that, so we’ve put together a list of seven of the top solutions and compared them on features, pricing, and fit for different teams. We’ll also look at the benefits of using an online workspace, as well as what to look for in a tool. 

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What are the benefits of using an online workspace? 

Whether your teams are remote, hybrid, or in-person, an online workspace levels the playing field, providing the same experience for everyone. People can connect, collaborate, and communicate in one central, virtual space. 

The best online workspaces let you: 

• Communicate and work together in real time 
• Do more asynchronously, which allows you to cancel more meetings  
• Get visibility into who’s responsible for what, and what your deadlines are  
• Keep track of projects, tasks, and conversations so nothing slips through the cracks 
• Boost teamwork 
• Easily share and manage files, documents, and information 
• Reduce unproductive context switching between multiple tools and tabs 
• Build strong connected teams 
• Foster a collaborative company culture and community 

What to look for in an online workspace

Here are a few key functionalities to look for in your online workspace tool:  

• A virtual office that acts as a central space for people to find each other and get work done, both in meetings and in between them  
• Asynchronous communication features so you can move faster with fewer meetings 
• File, web app, and document sharing for better knowledge management and information sharing 
• Space to save all relevant tools and docs in one place, which cuts down time searching for or sharing information  
• Project collaboration tools so you can keep everyone organized and rowing in the same direction 

• Visibility into who’s working on what and brings speed and clarity to decision-making
• Cross-functional and cross-company collaboration capabilities—including with external stakeholders 
• Time-saving tools for meetings and sharing information afterward  

• Features that enable interactive, hands-on meetings and interactions rather than just passive ones 

• Integrations with the tools your teams already use, so you’re always working from a source of truth 
• Engagement features to boost participation and create a sense of community 

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at seven of the best online workspaces for your teams. 

The 7 best online workspaces for collaboration

To choose the right software for your team, you need to think about what they need and how they work together. Our detailed guide will help you evaluate seven tools so you can choose the best one for your team.

1. Switchboard

Switchboard is an online collaboration platform that helps you move faster with fewer meetings. You can share ideas, give feedback, and make decisions in interactive rooms for projects, dashboards, and meetings. The expansive canvas in each room gives you space to visually organize and share applications, files, and documents. You can work in the room by yourself or teams can flip on video to meet in the place where all their work is ready to go.

Switchboard is an online workspace for sharing and discussing work. Whether you're planning projects, tracking metrics, or reviewing client work, Switchboard brings people, applications, and conversations together in one place.

People use Switchboard to organize and share their work online, recreating the feeling of working side by side. For example, you can create a Switchboard room and drag, drop, and organize all the tools you’re already using on the canvas. Websites, applications, images, videos, PDFs, sticky notes—they all can be used side by side in a Switchboard room. 

When you share the room with others working on the project, you can hop in and work together as if you were in the same physical space. Apps, docs, files, and the latest comments are all at your fingertips. And because Switchboard saves your work, you can also make progress async on your own time. This, plus the opportunity for more spontaneous online interactions, helps prevent people defaulting to constant meetings for every decision, or just to keep people in the loop. 

Features: 

• Expansive canvas to add browser-based apps, websites, PDFs, and images
• Switchboard AI, which can answer questions and generate summaries of room activity
• Multiplayer browsers that support any website or web-based application, so you can work side-by-side on anything—without sharing screens 
• Room recording so people can catch up on meetings or leave video notes for each other 
• Sections to organize content
• Presentation mode, to get people to focus on your view
• Built-in whiteboard and whiteboarding tools including sticky notes, shapes, notepads
• Apps including timer, voting, polls, icebreaker generator, and open questions
• Comment threads on any image, video, or sticky note in a room so you can communicate in context 
• Audio and video conferencing 
• In-room chat
• In-app support
• Up to 200 rooms for projects, meetings, and more
• Up to 500 members and unlimited meeting guests
• Up to 300 GB storage per workspace
• App for macOS

Pricing:

• Free: Includes limited features, rooms, and members, as well as up to 40 minutes for video calls (ideal for very small teams or individuals).  
• Pro: $15 member/month for up to 200 rooms and 500 members; plus Switchboard AI and additional storage.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

When you sign up for free, you get access to all Pro features during your trial. After that, you can keep your Pro plan or move to the free plan with limited features, rooms, and members. 

Best for:
Switchboard is ideal for highly collaborative teams–whether remote, hybrid, or in person–that want to work together more efficiently with fewer meetings. 

2. Notion

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Notion is a digital workspace that lets teams get organized and collaborate on shared documents and workspaces in real time. You can create intuitive workflows from your existing documents and notes, as well as design detailed guides, codebases, and project roadmaps. There’s also an option to publish important announcements directly to your website—so everyone's always in the loop. Notion gives context to your work and facilitates knowledge management and sharing, which helps boost team productivity. 

Features: 

• Collaborative workspaces to connect teams, projects, and docs in one place 
• Wikis and to-do lists for easy task prioritization
• File storage and sharing 
• Project mapping, timelines, and calendars  
• Customizable templates 
• Meeting notes 
• Real-time edits, comments, and notifications 
• Drag and drop task manager 
• Ability to set deadlines and due dates on tasks and projects 

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited features and functionality 
• Plus: $8/month per user  
• Business: $15/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom priced 

Best for: 

Teams that generate a lot of content or ideas and need to keep it all organized and searchable. Notion is also a good option for design or product teams that need to build and standardize their internal processes, resources, and workflows.

3. Coda

Coda is a cloud-based document management and sharing tool that brings content, data, and teams together. Use it to create documents that integrate with your favorite apps for a streamlined organizational database, up-to-date resources, and company knowledge that scales with you. 

Features: 

• Document editor
• Drag and drop task manager 
• Version history
• Multi-user collaboration and sharing features 
• Triggers and task automation 
• Task prioritization and automation 
• Customizable forms 
• Knowledge management and organization 
• AI assistant 
• App integrations

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited features and functionality 
• Pro plan: $10/month per Doc Maker
• Team plan: $30/month per Doc Maker
• Enterprise: Custom priced 

Best for: 

Teams that prioritize data-driven documentation and need to create intuitive product development workflows and roadmaps to stay on track. 

4. Trello 

Trello is a work and project management tool that organizes and simplifies processes and collaboration through personalized cards, boards, and calendar updates. It breaks project management, meetings, and key team information into their component parts, which you can visualize on an intuitive dashboard, improving team alignment and productivity. You can also automate manual or repetitive tasks, giving your team back more time for high value work.  

Features: 

• Unlimited cards and boards 
• Calendar, timeline, dashboard, and map views 
• Automated workspace commands and triggers
• Task prioritization and progress tracking
• To-do lists 
• Project mapping and tracking  
• Integration with other tools

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited features and functionality  
• Standard: $5/month per user
• Premium: $10/month per user
• Enterprise: $17.50/month per user  

Best for: 

Teams need to be able to create and follow well-defined workflows across various tasks and project types. 

5. Monday

Monday is a project management tool that lets you customize workflows to your team or department's needs. Use it to stay on track during complex or long running projects involving internal team members and external stakeholders or contractors. Defined workflows, task prioritization, and recurring task management mean nothing slips through the cracks. You also get snapshots of the months or weeks ahead for greater visibility into workloads and deadlines.  

Features: 

• Task creation, assignment, and management  
• Workboards 
• Time tracking 
• Project mapping 
• To-do lists 
• Timeline and Gantt views 
• Activity dashboard 
• Automated workflows and workflow templates
• Supports multiple workflows

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited features and functionality  
• Basic: $8/month per user 
• Standard: $10/month per user 
• Pro: $16/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Best for: 

Teams that need a simple birds-eye view of complex projects with a lot of moving parts.  

6. Asana

Asana is a comprehensive work management tool that lets teams assign, manage, and move tasks through a workflow. You also get visibility on meeting agendas, project plans, and work requests, which enables better planning and resource management. Asana is an easy to use and scalable platform for a variety of processes, including Agile development methods. 

Features: 

• Workflow builder 
• Timelines and Gantt chart
• Boards for project management 
• Calendar view
• Workload reporting 
• Automations to streamline workflows
• Project templates and dashboards 
• Messaging 

Pricing: 

• Personal: Free for individuals and small teams, with limited features and functionality  
• Starter: $10/month per user
• Advanced: $22/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom priced  

Best for: 

Organizations that want an intuitive, easy to use tool for project management. 

7. ClickUp

ClickUp is a productivity app that breaks projects and workflows into their component tasks with deadlines and owners that are visible on shared Kanban boards. As well as getting visibility into where everything is, you can also collaborate by tagging team members in tasks for in-context communication. ClickUp also offers visibility into workloads and time invested in tasks, as well as automating repetitive tasks like notifications.  

Features: 

• Task creation, assignment, and management
• Project views and Gantt charts
• Email automations and notifications  
• Task reminders and comments
• Whiteboard function
• AI assistant 
• Time tracking  
• Knowledge sharing and management  

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited features and functionality  
• Unlimited: $7/month per member
• Business: $12/month per member 
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Best for: 

Teams that follow standardized processes and workflows with several people involved at each stage.  

How Switchboard boost teamwork online  

Switchboard lets you organize all the apps and tools your team uses into interactive rooms that foster team communication, collaboration, and productivity. This enables more asynchronous working, eliminates silos, and keeps everyone on the same page without the need for constant meetings.   

Other collaborative platforms operate in silos. They allow you to collaborate on a file, not a project, level. It’s up to you to draw connections, attempt to integrate every tool, wade through notifications, and make sure everyone is on the same page. By contrast, Switchboard is the only online workspace that unites all your people, files, and internal collaboration tools in one place for asynchronous project work. However, you can also collaborate in real time if you need to with video, audio, team chat, polls, and emoji reactions. So you’ve always got the best of both worlds. Think of it like a shared operating system that acts as a central source of truth, letting you collaborate at project level and keep everyone and everything organized in persistent rooms. 

Best of all, all the other tools mentioned in this post work in Switchboard—with no fiddly integrations. Just pull up what you need with a simple copy paste and get to work. 

Online workspaces: the key to more productive, connected teams  

Online working offers a ton of benefits in terms of flexibility, better organization, and visibility over who’s working on what. This can help break down silos and make your teams more productive. But you need the right tool. One that makes it easy for people to connect and share information anytime, from anywhere. 

With that in mind, in this post, we reviewed seven tools that’ll let you do just that: Switchboard, Notion, Coda, Monday, Asana, Trello, and ClickUp. All offer great features for project management and collaboration but none equal Switchboard for truly connected teams and work. Its dedicated, multiplayer rooms let you share, collaborate, and communicate in context about anything—in real time or async. Plus, all the other online workspace tools work inside the rooms, so you can have your collaboration cake and eat it—all in one place. 

Bring all your apps and people together to get more done.

‍Work side by side on anything in Switchboard rooms that save your work. 

Sign up free